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I’ve been a fan of Willi Carlisle’s since YouTube’s algorithm sent me into the orbit of his Western AF performance of “Cheap Cocaine,” a song about “being a teenager and doing too many drugs in a punk house and calling your mom and telling her you don’t wanna do it anymore.” Carlisle is of an important coterie of singer/songwriters coming out of the South right now. He calls Fayetteville, Arkansas home, as do his best pals Dylan Earl and Nick Shoulders.
Carlisle put out one of my favorite records of 2022, the beautiful and dense country and prose stylings of Peculiar, Missouri. Now, he’s back with his third album, Critterland—which is set to arrive on January 26, 2024 via Signature Sound Records. The title track lead single is another brilliant composition from Carlisle, who has quickly established himself as one of country music’s most important and unmistakable voices.
“Critterland” feels familiar, especially if you grew up in a town that tried to carve out a destiny for you and admonish any strangeness from your bones, from your DNA. This push-and-pull between being a leftist queer kid in a small town greatly populated by Appalachian transplants and blue-collar folk raised to exile their own if they don’t fall in line, I can feel it all over again across all four minutes of “Critterland.” “In the decade of our lovin’, we have grown to not-so-young. I have come to know the seasons by the lashing of your tongue, but propane gently sputters, there’s spring water in our tap,” Carlisle reflects. “Oh, why can’t we feel the peace of this sweet dog upon our laps?” The language is visceral and relentless, as he considers what life the people nearby will let him live and how the animals are kinder to their young than the family, folks and strangers he calls his neighbors—and even himself.
It’s a banjo-and-harmonica tune that centers Carlisle’s beautiful tenor vocals and his honest, patient and empathetic gaze across the world before him. He doesn’t possess the twang of the country mainstream; rather, it embellishes the grit and the density of a singer like Townes Van Zandt. “And when the marauders come, ’cause the apocalypse is nigh, I want my rifle on my shoulder and my lover by my side. I want to be the kinda man that stands his ground and dies, take my fiddle and my good hat and go out in style,” Carlisle sings. “I’ll do it all for family, not for glory or a God, in the war that’s ragin’ ‘tween the haves and the have-nots.” It very well might be the most devastating country song of 2023—in fact, I’ll wager that it certainly is. Thank goodness for Willi Carlisle and his unapologetic writing.
“This was borne out of trying and failing to live on an intentional community in Stone County, Arkansas, a gorgeous place,” Carlisle says about “Critterland.” “At its simplest, it’s bucolic: the power of love (sex) is the power of nature, is the remedy of the granny witch and the herbalist, the song of the sparrow and the pouch of the opossum. ‘Love is a burden if it isn’t brave,’ so even if you’re labeled a ‘queer and a communist,’ it’s worth fighting for your fucked up family at the end of days.”
Listen to Willi Carlisle’s “Critterland” below.